On a warm afternoon in the early days of October, I stopped by Monika’s apartment, my first time meeting her since she moved out from her old home, which had been a stone’s throw from mine. Monika opened the door bubbling with energy, dressed in rose pants and a black blouse with a jacket thrown over it, which gave the impression of a laboratory coat. She had in fact been tinkering around her perfume lab she told me. She was in a groove. Could we catch up later on?

That kind of groove can be catchy. As I left, admiring her eye for beauty and detail, resplendent in every nook of the apartment, I had the distinct feeling that though we’d postponed sitting down to chat, I’d nevertheless received something. Many of us who knew Monika, agreed on this: in the last few months she’d been exuding that groove; like the jasmine and vetiver bouquet that she adored, that groove felt buoyant, energizing, and of the earth.

Part of that groove was a certain confidence-despite-fear. Earlier this year, in July, over a morning coffee, in his quiet way, my partner Parag had handed me his phone; on it was displayed a short mail from Monika who had been a regular attendee at his early morning Kalaripayattu martial arts class. “Happy Guru Poornima,” Monika had written, “almost a year of Kalaripayattu classes have unleashed a little monster in me: a capacity and a belief that I can handle any situation and stay fearless.”

In the first few days of her death, I could only think with horror of the gap between the experience of fearlessness that Monika had only recently created for herself, with some effort and difficulty, and her death during which she must have surely been terrified. It seemed an extraordinary cruelty that someone who has travelled and for a moment overcome the psychic geography of fear—in her mind at least, which is perhaps the only nirbhaya that any of us is going to get—should be subjected in the physical world to a torturous death during which she no doubt experienced abject, horrific fear. And yet it seems also that this unrealistic nirbhaya is what women must court in order to survive.

“Let everything happen to you/Beauty and terror/Just keep going/No feeling is final,” wrote the poet Rilke, in his Book Of Hours. In the early hours of the morning, the day after Monika’s cremation, I recall Rilke elsewhere, in the Duino Elegies: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror/which we are barely able to endure/ and it amazes us so/ because it serenely disdains to destroy us.”

It seemed to me that Monika had been in those last months, confronting her terrors such that she might experience the beauty of being in the world. For her murderer of course this journey of hers was irrelevant; Monika as the subject of her own story was annihilated by someone to whom her subjective experience was unknown and to whom therefore she could be an object. Perhaps it must be said here that there is no doubt that Monika’s murderer had also had his subjectivity annihilated: the same system that disfavours modern women living alone also disfavours poor men who are sacked without pay. The messages that float out into the world however, are perceptibly different for each gender, and here I will speak about the message that goes out to women

When a certain kind of murder takes place over and over again, it delivers a symbolic message in the popular imagination. What that message is, appears fairly clear in the way the media has reported Monika’s death: women who are out there in the world making a name for themselves, women who wear dresses and sunglasses, who are beautiful, risk terrifying deaths. Funny thing is Monika had clearly already received this message, as has almost any woman in her generation. She was scared; she took martial arts classes; she shored up herself to do that difficult thing of allowing herself the gift of physical beauty but also cultivating psychic beauty by which I mean the process of fructifying her talents in the world despite the terrors that this process entails. This process, what Monika called “unleashing a little monster in me” is the weightless, necessary, critical shield for a gigantic monstrosity, something that we take great pains to keep unconscious: that no economic privilege, no martial arts classes, can protect women from the extraordinary risk we must “invite” upon our person if we are to walk into the desirable, terrible, world.